What I loved about Breaking Bad wasn't just Walter's character's story arc, the normal, ostensibly 'good' bloke turned bad, how he slowly (or relatively quickly, depending on your perspective), descended from desperate dad/husband, determined to do right by his family, very out of his depth, in way over his head, to someone who not only got the measure of the drugs industry, and not only learned to operate in it, but eventually to thrive in it. He had hidden depths, that he plumbed only too willingly. And I don't only mean depths to his character generally, in terms of him not being just one dimensional, he had so many different facets, but also the depths to which he plumbed in terms of criminality/badness - and how much of that was due to his desire/urge to do right by his family, his initial motivation, and how much of that, eventually, was him growing (devolving?) into that kind of character/person. It seemed like he was originally playing that kind of character under duress, because needs must, but then eventually he tapped into something within his own character/psyche... what are any of us capable of, given the 'right' - or rather wrong - conditions?
It reminded me about confidence/fake it till you make it, kind of thing. If you pretend to be a bad guy, and you do bad guy things... at what point do you stop being a good guy pretending to be a bad guy (because needs must), at what point does the ostensibly good guy actually become the bad guy? Is a good guy doing bad things for good reasons still a good guy, or has he crossed over into being a bad guy? How bad do the things he does have to be before that line is crossed and the good guy becomes the bad guy? I found that fascinating.
But what I loved most was Walter's relationship with Jesse and how their character/story arcs oscillated - it wasn't as simple as Walter = teacher = clever = good versus Jesse = high school drop-out/trouble-maker = not clever = bad. On the surface it was, in very, very broad strokes. But what I loved was the interplay between the characters mashing up those simplistic binaries, how Jesse would get into trouble and clever Walter would rescue Jesse from whatever dilemma he was in (as you'd expect, Walter being a teacher, being clever), but the twist was that Walter often got himself into trouble through lack of 'street smart' and Jesse would often have to rescue Walter from himself/from whatever trouble he'd gotten himself into through his lack of street smarts. They were both good, in different ways, they were both bad, in different ways, sometimes bad in the same ways. But through it all, despite their ups and downs, they were in it together, through thick and thin, and there seemed to be an almost father-son type relationship between them, some kind of familial fondness, despite their disparate background and how they ended up entangled together.
I loved all that.
